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Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Caption reads: Mrs. Warren Springer, a well-to-do society woman of Chicago,visiting in the "Ghetto." Mrs. Springer is one of the many noble-hearted womenof our country that devote their time and money to the assistance of the deserving poor.

It’s an old story: a newcomer
who wants desperately to be accepted by the elite. Usually, the way it goes is
that the blue bloods give her a hard time.

The
latecomer Mrs. Springer gave it right back, no pretty-please for her.

The daughter of Irish
immigrants, Maggie Maginness was born in 1870 in Newark, Ohio, about 30 miles
east of Columbus. She always claimed that her family came from old Scotch-Presbyterian
stock, yet inexplicably she lived in a Franciscan Sisters convent in Lexington,
KY, between the ages of 10 and 20.

When Maggie left the convent,
gossips said, she worked as a shop girl in Chicago. Presumably, that’s how she
met the real estate and manufacturing mogul, Warren Springer, whom she married
sometime during the 1880s. Daughter Frances came along in 1893; Warren’s son
from his first marriage, William, was estranged.

And now Marguerite Warren
Springer – she took her millionaire husband’s first name for her middle name,
so there would be no confusion as to which Mr. Springer she was married – prepared to enter Chicago society with Gilded
Age flourish.

There she
is, volunteering with Chicago’s Visitation and Aid Society, patting a howling
baby with her gloved hand.

Then she’s basking
in attention, having pledged to provide land at Van Buren & Green Streets
on which an Industrial Arts School would be built.

Next she’s telling the Cook County League
of Women’s Clubs that the Chicago Public Library is a “trysting place for
tramps.”

Now she’s starting an Illinois chapter of
the Daughters of the Revolution after the Illinois chapter of the Daughters of
the American Revolution has turned down her application for membership.

Later, the D.A.R. regent,
Mrs. Alice Bradford Wiles, stated that she “didn’t like what she knew about
Mrs. Springer.”

What Mrs. Wiles knew was that
in July 1894 Warren Springer posted $10,000 bail for his wife after she was
indicted by a grand jury for attempting to bribe a juror in the case of Metropolitan Elevated Railway Co. vs. Warren
Springer.

Mr. Springer had sued the
company for damages to buildings that he owned. Marguerite approached the wife
of a juror (or two jurors, or their mothers, depending on the newspaper
report), who told the judge.

Hence a dramatic courtroom
scene where Marguerite was identified as the briber. Indicted twice, she never
served time.

Evidently, though, the feud
between the D.A.R. and the Daughters of the Revolution went on and on. The two
organizations sparred for primacy. Chicago’s society women had no choice but to
take sides.

A “struggle
for social supremacy,” as one reporter characterized it. By 1904, Marguerite
had had enough.

That year, she once again
attempted to influence her husband’s business dealings. An attorney named
Julius Coleman was involved in litigation against Warren Springer. Marguerite
wanted to get Coleman off the case.

She admitted that she started
digging around and turned up a juicy story about Mr. Coleman. In 1881, he was
arrested on a charge of perjury while practicing law in Indiana. He escaped
from prison, fled to Mexico, and eventually returned to Indiana where the
governor pardoned him.

Marguerite went to the
newspapers with this information. The State of Illinois promptly started proceedings
to disbar Coleman, who protested that he had told the truth when he applied for
the Illinois bar. This created quite a stir.

And on top of everything,
none other than Mrs. Julius Coleman was the regent of the Illinois chapter of
the D.A.R.

The story broke while Mrs.
Springer, Mrs. Coleman, and hundreds of other women were gathered in St. Louis
for the annual convention of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. The
D.A.R. faction declared its loyalty to Mrs. Coleman and denounced Marguerite Warren
Springer. The following day, a front page headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune stated:

Will
Ostracize Mrs. Springer;

Club
Women Plan to Punish Chicagoan for Attacking Julius A. Coleman

Social
ostracism for Mrs. Warren Springer is the plan decided upon by the club friends
of Mrs. Julius A. Coleman, whose husband Mr. and Mrs. Springer are seeking to
have disbarred because of an offense forgotten for 23 years. Mrs. Springer has
admitted that she personally brought to light the old conviction of the lawyer,
and Mrs. Coleman’s friends assert that she will be made to pay for this “spite
work.”

The story closed with a quote
from a Coleman ally:

Mrs.
Springer has been trying by resorting to every method to get to the front in
Chicago. This last attempt on her part to cause two hearts to ache as they have
not ached for 20 years will not raise her any in the estimation of Chicago
women.

Newspaper sketch of Marguerite Warren Springer, 1904

In 1912, Warren Springer
died. Soon after, his widow contacted an architect to design a charity hospital
for women which would be built on property on Harrison Street, Chicago.

The hospital would be six
stories with an “elegant façade,” a lighted crystal fountain, and a goldfish
pool. There would be a private dining room and bedroom for Mrs. Springer. She
asked the architect to create the Springer Coat of Arms, which “dated from the
time of Charlemagne,” she told him, in gold on vellum.

As a physician “with a
special certificate in gynecology and abdominal surgery,” she would practice in
the hospital. Yikes!

Then it turned out that there
would be just “eight small booths” for charity patients. Those women would
enter the hospital through an alleyway, the architect said later.

He finished the plans and
sent a bill to Marguerite Springer. She would not pay it so he sued her. Then
he discovered that she didn’t own any property on Harrison Street.

Do you want to hear about Marguerite
and the car raffle embezzlement incident?

We tend to hear less about
uncomfortable discoveries, although Ben Affleck did make a fuss when he learned
that one of his ancestors was a slaveholder during an appearance on the
historian Henry Louis Gates’s television show, “Finding Your Roots.” Affleck
asked Gates to cut that part of the segment, and Gates complied.But I’m
talking about the small revelations, like when I found out that my mother’s
father had been widowed before he married her mother, and that the wife who
died had been pregnant.

Those types of discoveries,
not advertised by Ancestry.com, have the potential to shock and hurt. However,
that is not always the case.

Me: Mom, what would you say
if I told you that your father had been married previously?

Mom: At my age, nothing would
surprise me.

Her father, Joseph Stromberg,
emigrated along with nearly two million Jews from Russia to the United States
during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. During these
years, Russian Jews were subjected to unspeakably violent pogroms conducted by
the Cossacks, which Czar Nicholas tacitly encouraged. The Ukrainian town of
Letichev, where Joseph lived, underwent a wave of brutality between 1903 and
1906.

Joseph’s story is not
remarkable; notable perhaps because he was just 14 years old and traveled
alone. On November 5, 1906, he boarded the ship Smolensk, which departed from the port of Libau, in western Latvia
on the Baltic Sea, arriving at Ellis Island on November 23.

The next time Joseph showed
up was in 1916, petitioning for naturalization. He renounced all allegiance and
fidelity to “Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias.” And his occupation was
“cigar manufacturer.”Cigar
manufacturing in the United States, like much of what is learned about American history, reveals itself to be a story about labor strife. Often,
cigar makers worked in the tenements where they lived and the entire family
participated. Ribbons of leaves were stripped from the stems, the smaller
leaves crushed and assembled, and the ribbons carefully rolled around the
filler and secured with vegetable paste.

Larger shops had division of
labor. “Casers” prepared the leaves by moistening and bending them. “Strippers”
removed the large ribs of the leaves and stems. “Bunchbreakers” prepared the
filler. “Rollers” rolled the filler, wrapped the strips of leaves around it,
and cut the open ends. “Packers” put the finished cigars in boxes.

The English-born Samuel
Gompers, who became the first president of the American Federation of Labor, started
as a shoemaker’s apprentice at the age of seven but switched to cigar making
when his family immigrated to the U.S. in 1863.Within a few
years Gompers had become a master cigar maker and moved to a larger shop where
he was influenced by German socialists. In 1875, when the Cigar Makers
International Union (CMIU) merged with United Cigar Makers of New York, Local
144, Samuel Gompers became its president.

Subsequently, Gompers began
lobbying the New York State Legislature to ban cigar manufacturing in tenement
houses. In 1882, he published a report about the working conditions of tenement
cigar makers.

No.
90 Cannon St. is a five story double tenement house. Fifteen families live in
the house, an average of four on each floor. Each family has a room and a
bedroom; the size of the room is 11 by 13 feet, the bedroom 5-1/2 by 7-1/2 feet
. . . *

The families worked from 6 in
the morning until 10 or 11 at night. The rooms were filthy, filled with tobacco
residue. Worst of all were the discarded tobacco stems, which became rotten and
moldy, discarded in piles in the corners of the rooms.

In 1883, the New York State
Legislature passed a bill abolishing cigar making in tenements. But the
manufacturers danced around it and despicable conditions persisted. Cigar
manufacturers and the CMIU continued to do battle for years.

Cigar Makers Journal, published by the Cigar Makers International Unionbetween 1875 and 1972

Who knows if
Joseph Stromberg worked in tenement conditions? I think not (perhaps I would
rather think not) because he lived in a part of Brooklyn where there were houses,
no tenements. Either way, he made cigars until 1919 when he married Sarah
Litowitz, the daughter of a shirt manufacturer who owned a factory that
employed 77 people.

In the 1920 census, Joseph
described his occupation as collar manufacturing, so he probably went to work
for his father-in-law. But Sarah
died of eclampsia in the spring of 1920. That is a dangerous condition of
pregnancy involving very high blood pressure.

Joseph stopped making collars
and returned to cigars, but this time he started his own shop with its own
brand, “Dick Robin.”

He remarried in 1927. He met
my grandmother because he was a boarder in my great-grandmother’s house.

Joseph remained a cigar store
proprietor until the early 1930s, when he went into the luncheonette business.
But that’s another story.

My grandfather advertised his own cigar brand,"Dick Robin," in The Retail Tobacconist, 1922.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Traveling back to 1890, the
dark front hall of the Prairie Avenue mansion when the son walked out or was
told to leave and never return. But evidently William hung around Chicago
working as a streetcar conductor, ringing up fares paid by his millionaire father
and stepmother as they rode in his car without speaking.

Then William “went out into
the world for myself,” he later told a reporter.

While
I had a good education, I found a few years later that if I intended to travel
all the time I would have to have some sort of occupation where I could ‘catch
on,’ as the saying is. From accounting I took up sign painting.

And that’s what William was
doing in February 1912, painting signs in Little Rock, Arkansas, for the
Capital City Advertising Company. Everyone called him Bill until the newspapers
announced that his father had died and his stepmother had launched a nationwide
search for the son to receive half of the $2 million estate. Incredulous, he
heeded the call.

“To begin at the beginning,”
the new heir said, reflecting on his life story.

So literary!

He recalled constant
quarreling with his father, Warren, who was very strict. “It appeared to me
that he wanted to have all the fun, while I should tread the straight and
narrow path,” William recounted.

The boy’s parents separated in
Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the 1870s. His mother promptly remarried. Warren off
went to Chicago and made a fortune. First he built a machinery manufacturing plant
but the Great Fire destroyed it in 1871. Soon after, Springer purchased land on
Canal Street, along the Chicago River, for $50 per foot. He built a lumber mill
that Chicagoans dubbed “Springer’s Folly” because of its location beyond the
city’s original business district.

Warren ignored the ridicule
and went on to build 13 more factories including a boot & shoe manufacturing
plant and printing company, with offices and salesrooms located in the same
building.

In 1893, he sold off his
factories and began to invest full-time in Chicago real estate, becoming known
as “the Father of the West Side.”

Sometime during the 1880s,
Warren Springer married Marguerite Maginness, an Ohio native. They would have a
daughter, Frances.

Mrs. Springer became involved
in the Arts and Crafts Movement in Chicago, pledging land on which an
Industrial Arts League would be built. Her circle included the instigators
Professor Oscar Lovell Triggs, Murray Schloss, and others who opposed
capitalism and various social conventions.She
also served as a Regent of the Daughters of the Revolution (a D.A.R. rival) and volunteered with several philanthropies.

Marguerite Warren Springer, 1890s(newspaper sketch)

By February 8, 1912, when
Warren Springer died, Professor Triggs had been fired by the University of
Chicago and lived in California. But Marguerite made a big announcement. She planned
to bring Triggs back to the city to help fulfill her late husband’s dream of a farm
colony for the poor. On February 14, she told the Chicago Tribune:

Mr.
Springer experimented with agricultural schemes . . . He came to the conclusion
that the cultivation of strawberries, raspberries, onions, sugar beets, and
pickles would prove the most practical and profitable. He had the promise of a
pickle manufacturer to establish a factory near the farm as soon as the colony
was established.

The story was that Springer
and Triggs had planned a colony which would provide "social betterment for the
working classes." After Triggs’s dismissal, Warren begged his friend to start
the community, Marguerite said, but Triggs was tired of the limelight and
turned it down.

A few days after a
story about the colony appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, Marguerite offered a reward to the finder of her
disinherited stepson, William.

“It was Mr.
Springer’s last wish that I should find his boy and try to give him the
happiness of the home from which he has been barred too long.” Then she pledged
to give William half of the $2 million estate.

If William received the $1
million, he disappeared with it. The colony never materialized. Marguerite, who
claimed to be a physician although she never advanced beyond high school, flitted
about Chicago and remarried briefly in 1916.

I thought the story would end
here. But it turns out that Marguerite Warren Springer, even in the glare of
high society, came in many shapes and sizes.

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

My friend Richard can restore
any object in the universe. His particular talent lies in cars and furniture.
He is very happy when you bring him an old piece; Victorian, perhaps, or early
American.

He’ll walk
around, shaking his head. “I think this chest was supposed to be painted. The
wood is pine. Somebody stripped it and stained it to dress it up, but that’s
wrong.

“The guy who
made this – he went out to his barn one morning and said, ‘I’ll use these
boards lying around, and those cotter-pin hinges.’

“It’s not
meant to be fancy. Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out.”

Driving away, he’s already got
it, if you know what I mean.

Later, he’ll describe how the
chest looked originally and the mistakes made by the person who tried to restore
it a half-century later.

I can almost
see my husband’s grandmother – her name was Marian – nodding her head and
making that funny clucking sound, recalling something about its provenance and which
room it graced in the family home on Church Street in Naugatuck, Connecticut.

Her father,
a physician named Edwin Johnson, had an eye for antiques. Born in 1867, he grew
up the son of a joiner. That’s a carpenter who builds decorative pieces like
crown molding and balustrades. The construction of those items usually occurs
in a workshop, but Edwin’s father must have been installing something when he
fell off a roof and was injured badly.

The family had enough money
to send Edwin to a private boarding school in Litchfield, Connecticut. Then he
went off to study medicine at the University of Vermont. Sometime during the
1880s he married and was widowed; in 1890 he remarried to Cora Collins, an
imperious young lady from Hillsborough, N.H.

“There were two villages, upper
and lower,” Marian explained the first time we met. “The Collinses were from
the upper village. And that (she pointed to a bureau) is the ‘Hillsborough
dresser.’ I remember when it came down in a wagon from my grandparents’ house.”
Cluck, cluck.

By the time Dr. Johnson died
in 1930, he had amassed quite a collection of early American antiques. When his
wife Cora died eight years later, three of their children – the eldest son, a
black sheep, was excluded from everything – arranged a lottery so that the
furnishings could be distributed as equitably as possible.

The "Hillsborough dresser," early 19th century (detail)

I like to contemplate the
overbearing doctor, his life split almost evenly with 33 years in the
nineteenth century and 30 years in the twentieth century, having such a strong
affinity with furniture created well before he came into the world.

You see, by 1910 when he
accelerated his purchases, the American furniture industry was well underway.
Most Americans were happier with new furniture, with clean unblemished
possessions. Also, new stuff demonstrated that the owner could afford it.

But there was a precedent for sticking with the past.

The
Centennial International Exposition, held in Philadelphia in 1876, was the nation’s
first official world’s fair. Many exciting things happened there, including a
demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone and Sir Joseph
Lister’s lecture about the importance of antiseptic surgery.

Among the exhibitions, the
fair showed examples of American craftsmanship, namely furniture from workshops
such as Duncan Phyfe’s in New York City; also pieces by Philadelphia, Boston,
and Rhode Island cabinetmakers.

Not coincidentally, after
1876 Americans began to appreciate and value American material culture.

Dr. Johnson wasn’t looking
for famous names, however. It turns out that his source, a grizzled Civil War
veteran (is there any other kind?) who lived in rural Connecticut, liked old
things and kept them in the hay loft of his barn. Once in a while the doctor
would come by and purchase a few pieces.

“I’d like to
give my daughter a dining room suite for her wedding,” he once told the man. “This drop-leaf table and those fiddle-back chairs. If you can find me
three more chairs, I’ll buy the lot.”

***

A few years ago, Richard and
I were driving around looking for interesting things. One store was a complete
jumble, but Richard emerged from the way back hugging a grimy metal statue of
Benjamin Franklin contemplating the universe.

“I’m going to refinish this.
Maybe I’ll keep it and maybe I’ll sell it,” he announced. I heard no more about
it until a few weeks later when Richard said there was a problem.

“Lana and Ben aren’t talking
to each other.”

He was referring to a large
oil painting of Lana Turner that hangs in his dining room. Beneath the portrait
is an Empire pier table where the newly refurbished Franklin was supposed to reside.

But it just didn’t work. Richard
has great style and he knew the truth.